In my industry, workflow is considered by many as a holy grail.  Most leaders of litigation support departments feel that they can control risks, issues, schedules, and quality through one comprehensive workflow or even a checklist.  It is tempting to think that a machine could orchestrate a project to such a degree of success that the humans involved cannot make errors.

Unfortunately, there is no perfect workflow in our industry.  Not a single litigation support manager I have spoken to feels that they have their hands around the problem.  And so, we look at vendor after vendor peddling their software with a state-of-the art workflow system built in.

So, why do these system's fail to achieve their promised goals?  Here is my list of "gotchas" about attempting to automate your project management functions via workflow:

• Poor planning - insufficient involvement by everyone involved with the system (IT, front-line employees, and management) during the early evaluation and planning stages of the implementation can lead to ballooning budgets and quirky systems forcing the employees to use workarounds and introduce all new and unknown risk into the process.
• Poor understanding of the limitations of workflow - it may handle human-to-human task management but when you add human-to-system and system-to-system interactions, event management/correlation, performance monitoring, change management, and process rules many systems just fall apart.
• Poor change management - sometimes the implementation of the workflow takes several months to complete.  Even with perfect planning at the beginning of an implementation, sometimes changes in the business outpace workflow development.  Many implementers fail to keep up with the pace business causing the delivered workflow to be out of date and unsuitable.
• No implementation with LOB applications - users touch many systems during a business process.  Many of these interactions are not documented anywhere.  A good workflow system needs to take into account integration with billing systems, case management systems, etc.
• Automating chaos - if your process is not clearly understood, defined, and optimized you will be automating chaos via workflow.  The result of this can only be "automated chaos."
• Forgetting the people -  sometimes it is important to understand that it is not all about nuts and bolts.  It may not be about the lack of Change Management or the way integration is done with LOB systems.  It’s about PEOPLE.  Involve the users, educate the users and get buy-in up-front, let the users champion the project direction, talk to the front-line employees and narrow the gap between IT techniques and the Business requirements.

Keep these things in mind if you insist on purchasing a system that attempts to automate your project management.  However, I recommend that litigation support managers look spend some time and optimize their people and process before they attempt to automate things.  Sometimes, the right people are all it takes.

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